The issue of hospital acquired infections is well known within and outside the health care community. Such infections kill more Americans each year than AIDS, breast cancer, and automobile accidents combined. To date many studies have been conducted in an effort to ascertain effective ways to reduce the occurrence of such infections, and the clear majority finds a thorough cleansing of one's hands prior to treating a patient as the single most important way to protect against the spread of hospital-acquired infections, As a result, many hospitals have implemented HHC systems for purposes of monitoring whether such persons wash their hands upon entering a patient's room. As such, HHC systems monitoring hand hygiene compliance are well established in the prior art.
However, the communication networks created by the aforementioned HHC systems generally monitor and report only hygiene-related events. As a result, these communication networks do not monitor non-hygiene events associated with a piece of equipment (i.e., a catheter), a supply, or a person for purposes of providing information relevant to hospital procedures, such as workflow procedures, based on data related to the piece of equipment, the supply, or the person. If HHC systems were improved to provide such non-hygiene related information, patient care would increase due to an increase in compliance with hospital workflow procedures which would result in an even greater overall reduction in the number of hospital-acquired infections. While current HHC systems are effective in monitoring hand hygiene compliance, they do not monitor and provide information related to various non-hygiene events (i.e. hospital workflow procedures).
Further, healthcare facilities routinely seek systems capable of monitoring and identifying tagged assets (that is, hospital employees having a wearable tag) use of hand hygiene dispensers. While wireless communications systems attempt to meet this need, they are subject to inefficiencies in terms of detecting and identifying, in a uniform manner, tagged assets' proximity to and use of a monitored device. Within the context of wireless communications, it is well known that transmitting data wirelessly poses significant challenges which must be addressed before robust and reliable communications may be achieved. One challenge, which is relevant to the present disclosure, relates to the noticeable decrease in system accuracy resulting from assigning both short range and long range communications functions to an individual node or connection point in the wireless communications system.
As an example of the challenge mentioned above, current wireless communications systems employing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology require a single RF radio of a microcontroller not only detect use of a monitored device by a tagged asset but also relay data relating to use of the monitored device to a server. This amounts to the RF radio handling both short range communications (that is, communications broadcast by tagged assets in proximity to the monitored device) as well as long range communications involving the server. With system resources available to a RF radio already limited by its RF engine, the RF radio cannot detect a short range communication from a tagged asset using the monitored device while simultaneously transmitting a long range communication to the server. Accordingly, results relating to use of a monitored device may not represent an accurate measure of the frequency with which the device is used. Furthermore, since the RF radio, tagged assets, and server are confined to communicating on the same channel of the network, the accuracy of results relating to use will decrease as the number of tagged assets increase due to an increase in the probability of the RF radio missing short range communications from tagged assets.
Another challenge, which stems from having a single RF radio handle short and long range communications, concerns power consumption of wearable RFID tags affixed to tagged assets. Having one RF radio per monitored device means RFID tags must listen for network traffic prior to communicating with the RF radio to avoid data collisions. This causes RFID tags to stay on longer, consuming more power per communication, which over time reduces the battery life of the wearable RFID tags. Therefore, there is a need for a wireless communications system employing RFID technology which overcomes these shortcomings.